Many of these features have only been brought to the web platform in the past few years, and often in rather sketchy ways. Web apps can’t use real sockets, so servers have to be changed to support “web sockets” instead. Things as basic as UI components are a disaster zone, there’s no Web IDE worth talking about and as for mixing different programming languages … well, you can transpile to JavaScript. Sometimes.
One reason developers like writing web apps is that user expectations on the web are extremely low. Apps for Windows 95 were expected to have icons, drag and drop, undo, file associations, consistent keyboard shortcuts, do useful things in the background … and even work offline! But that was just basic apps. Really impressive software would be embeddable inside Office documents, or extend the Explorer, or allow itself to be extended with arbitrary plugins that were unknown to the original developer. Web apps usually do none of these things.
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The fix: Let’s stop pretending REST is a good idea. REST is a bad idea that twists HTTP into something it’s not, only to work around the limits of the browser, another tool twisted into being something it was never meant to be. This can only end in tears. Taking into account the previous point, client/server communication should be using binary protocols that are designed specifically for the RPC use case.

"When you see pundits warn about the forthcoming wonders or terrors of robotics and Artificial Intelligence I recommend carefully evaluating their arguments against these seven pitfalls. In my experience one can always find two or three or four of these problems with their arguments.

A lot of ice moons seem to have interior oceans, warmed by tidal flexing and possibly radioactivity. But they’re lousy candidates for life, because you need free energy; and there’s very little in the interior oceans of such system.

It is possible that NASA is institutionally poor at pointing this out.

Average life span is pretty short for contemporary foragers (30-35 years). For that matter, it was short for agricultural peoples until fairly recently. Most people probably don’t know this. Most of the people who do know fundamentally misunderstand it. Today most people die when they’re old, moderately close to the average age of death. Back in the day, a very large fraction died when young, due to infectious disease and food shortages. And subincision. Most people who know about those short lifespans in the past somehow can’t really believe that infant mortality accounts for most of the difference. If the average lifespan was 30, they figure that hardly anyone made it to 40. I’ve had a doctor explain to me that that hardly anyone lived to be 70 in 1900 in the US (!).

We know that this is not the case in contemporary hunter-gatherers. If you make it to 15, you have a pretty good chance of making it to 60. Life expectancy at 15 was about 48 among the Australian Aborigines and 51 for the !Kung Bushmen. In some other groups, expected lifetime at 15 was lower, in the 30s. Still – even so lots of people made it to 60 or later.

A high average paternal age was only possible if quite a few guys lived well over 50 – but that happened.

I WOULD LIKE TO COIN A PHRASE, the complacent intellectual class, to describe the overwhelming number of pundits, thought leaders, and policy wonks who accept, welcome, or even enforce slovenly scholarship. These people might, in the abstract, like research that maintains the highest standards, they might even consider themselves academics or bona fide researchers, when in fact they have lost the capacity of maintaining even the most basic standards of rigor.

I am motivated to do so after reading Tyler Cowen’s new book The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream. I propose the term with some trepidation. Cowen—a George Mason University economist, libertarian theorist, and “legendary blogger” (to quote the book’s inset)—is often a smart commentator who puts his finger on a lot of interesting social phenomena, introduces novel ideas, and proves worth reading from time to time.

But books are different from blog posts and op-eds. And this book fails so glaringly that it makes me despair for this country’s literary culture and intellectual life in general. So let me use Cowen’s latest venture to illustrate what we should all demand from the work of our intellectual class, lest our nation continue to vegetate in the pretend-thinking of #AspenIdeas pseudo-academia.

It’s time to rename the ‘Adam Smith Institute’, now captured by drug legalisers. Something tells me the Scotch moralist wouldn’t have thought a stupefied and acquiescent population the best basis for civilisation, wealth or morality.

So I suggest calling this screeching nest of mentally pubescent drug zealots

The Adam Spliff Institute

I am moved to this suggestion by their latest attempt to debate the drug issue. I say ‘attempt’ because they really have very little idea of how to argue.

The idea that venesection was a good thing, or at least not so bad, on the grounds that one in a few hundred people have hemochromatosis (in Northern Europe) reminds me of the people who don’t wear a seatbelt, since it would keep them from being thrown out of their convertible into a waiting haystack, complete with nubile farmer’s daughter. Daughters. It could happen. But it’s not the way to bet.

Back in the good old days, Charles II, age 53, had a fit one Sunday evening, while fondling two of his mistresses.

Monday they bled him (cupping and scarifying) of eight ounces of blood. Followed by an antimony emetic, vitriol in peony water, purgative pills, and a clyster. Followed by another clyster after two hours. Then syrup of blackthorn, more antimony, and rock salt. Next, more laxatives, white hellebore root up the nostrils. Powdered cowslip flowers. More purgatives. Then Spanish Fly. They shaved his head and stuck blistering plasters all over it, plastered the soles of his feet with tar and pigeon-dung, then said good-night.

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Friday. The king was worse. He tells them not to let poor Nelly starve. They try the Oriental Bezoar Stone, and more bleeding. Dies at noon.

Most people didn’t suffer this kind of problem with doctors, since they never saw one. Charles had six. Now Bach and Handel saw the same eye surgeon, John Taylor – who blinded both of them. Not everyone can put that on his resume!

You may wonder how medicine continued to exist, if it had a negative effect, on the whole. There’s always the placebo effect – at least there would be, if it existed. Any real placebo effect is very small: I’d guess exactly zero. But there is regression to the mean. You see the doctor when you’re feeling worse than average – and afterwards, if he doesn’t kill you outright, you’re likely to feel better. Which would have happened whether you’d seen him or not, but they didn’t often do RCTs back in the day – I think James Lind was the first (1747).

Back in the late 19th century, Christian Scientists did better than others when sick, because they didn’t believe in medicine. For reasons I think mistaken, because Mary Baker Eddy rejected the reality of the entire material world, but hey, it worked. Parenthetically, what triggered all that New Age nonsense in 19th century New England? Hash?

This did not change until fairly recently. Sometime in the early 20th medicine, clinical medicine, what doctors do, hit break-even. Now we can’t do without it. I wonder if there are, or will be, other examples of such a pile of crap turning (mostly) into a real science.

1 is overweight
2 drinks more than officially recommended amounts
3 has an amused, tolerant atitude to human failings
4 is well aware that we're all going to die anyway, & there are better or worse ways to die
5 has a healthy skeptical attitude to mainstream medical science
6 is wholly dismissive of "a|ternative” medicine
7 believes in evolution
8 thinks most diseases get better without intervention, & knows the dangers of false positives
9 understands the base rate fallacy

Assuming population continuity, the selective advantage of the alleles they examined must have been very high. In order to see if there had been population continuity, they looked at the mtDNA frequencies of the ancient populations and compared them with mtDNA frequencies of modern populations in the same areas. Since they’re different, but not wildly different, they conclude that there has been population continuity, which was their null assumption.

That null assumption might have been reasonable, if someone had burned every history book ever written, while at the same time suppressing all the ancient DNA evidence.

Since that has not yet happened, I think their assumption is downright embarrassing. People have been moving in and out of this area for all of recorded history (as Razib Khan has also pointed out) : Cimmerians, Scythians, Goths, Khazars, Kievian Rus, the Golden Horde, eventually Russians.

There is no logical reason for geneticists to ignore information outside their field. Ignorance is no excuse. I could say the same for every other discipline. Cross the streams – it would be good.